Month: June 2010

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Papua: Autonomy Isn’t Independence

Philippe Pataud Celerier June 9, 2010 Philippe Pataud Celerier

Source: Le Monde Diplomatique

Linus, from Papua, said: “It doesn’t matter who the leader is, the dice are loaded against us.” For him, as for many others, the re-election in July 2009 of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (known as SBY) as Indonesian president was no surprise. Linus and his friend Agus are from Jayapura, the provincial capital of Papua, the western part of the island of New Guinea (1). They are studying to be civil servants in the city of Surabaya in eastern Java.

“Instead of independence we have ‘special’ autonomy,” said Agus. That status was won in January 2002. “It is so special nobody trusts it. All I know is I will at last get a job in a new district in the south of Papua. To separatist Papuans, I am a traitor. To most of our Javanese teachers, I am a monkey they are trying to lure down from the trees. I just want to feed my family.” read more

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The Oil Spill That Energized a Movement

Rob Reynolds, Al Jazeera June 8, 2010 Rob Reynolds, Al Jazeera

Source: Al Jazeera

The pictures looked so familiar – the ruined rig, a spreading stain of oil, birds and wildlife dying, a massive effort to clean up the deadly spill.

But instead of depicting the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, the photographs I was looking at in the library of the Santa Barbara, California Historical Museum showed a spill that happened four decades ago.

It was an event that changed Americans’ attitudes toward the environment forever.

Today, Santa Barbara is an affluent, laid-back beach town set between the mountains and the sea, with hardly a piece of litter to mar its pristine beaches. read more

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Networking the Neighborhood in Vermont

Bill McKibben June 8, 2010 Bill McKibben

Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife, Valerie, moved to the south end of Burlington, Vt. in 2000. He recalls, "We'd landed in what we thought was our dream neighborhood. It was walkable, near the lake, full of trees. But we were having trouble getting to know the neighbors. One night, my wife and I were sitting around the dinner table talking about it. It hit us that in the Midwest, where we're from, people brought cookies to their neighbors. We've been here a year-where were our cookies?"

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Gulf Oil Spill: America’s Chernobyl

Alejandro Nadal June 7, 2010 Alejandro Nadal

Source: Foreign Policy in Focus

The Deepwater Horizon disaster has the familiar ingredients of deregulation, deception, and destruction that characterize the relations between governments and multinational corporations. It was a man-made disaster, like Chernobyl.

And like the global financial crisis, it all started with the explosion of a bubble, this time of methane gas.

The Wages of Deregulation

In 2008 the Bush-Cheney duo lifted the executive order banning offshore drilling, and the House of Representatives agreed to let a 26-year-old moratorium on offshore drilling expire. Deregulation was moving full speed ahead. read more

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Haitian Sweatshops At Crossroads

Beverly Bell June 7, 2010 Beverly Bell

Haitian Sweatshop
The U.S. and U.N. have based their plan for Haiti's redevelopment on the expansion of the assembly industry. Toward this end, the U.S. Congress passed legislation last month which would expand benefits and income for U.S. investors yet again. Haitian workers will continue to earn $3.09 a day. Worker rights groups and other sectors of Haiti's social justice movements are adamant that a sweatshop-based development model cannot advance either the country or its workers.